Search This Blog

Looking Ahead

January almost passed without an inaugural post for the year, and clearly the months quickly turn into years! Here's to sticking with New Year's resolutions and polishing up many drafts waiting to see the light of screens 🥂 To start gaining momentum again, below are a few topics and technologies I'd like to spend more time with in the coming year.

JavaScript: Back to Basics

Last year, I slowed up on the relentless pursuit of All Thing JS. After years of doing something full time at work, it's often hard to maintain momentum and curiosity beyond work hours or work-related studying. Most important, there are other fun things to do besides coding! While my knowledge of React, build tools, Vue and (Chrome's) Developer Tools increased, I didn't spend nearly as much time with the language and browser internals as past years. This year I'd like to shift some attention back to the fundamentals of the language and its future direction. Also, one of my favorite topics, looking at trends in design/abstraction patterns in a given language and the problems they solve. Some of my favorites in this category include JavaScript Patterns(2010, still lots of good stuff) and Learning JavaScript Design Patterns (2017).

IoT

Time to dust off the Raspberry Pi and build some cool stuff this year. Nothing more to say on that. In terms of the FAANGs in the room, there are a few, though I've gravitated toward HomeKit ecosystem. Perhaps because I've been in the Apple ecosystem forever. (Wassup, Performa 575?) Some accessories haven't been as seamless to set up like this Wemo Mini Smart Plug. While this had to do with my home Internet router, for a company like that builds various wifi and router devices, I expected setup would be much more seamless. Others devices like the Phillips Hue bridge and lights have been a breeze and tons of fun.

The addition of Apple's Home app to OS X Mojave was a very welcome addition, especially since it brought OS X Siri HomeKit integration. Somewhere on my infinite side project list is doing something with the HomeKit APIs, we'll see what happens. Here's a free product idea for non-morning persons everywhere: HomeKit-compatible Smart Shades that open when your alarm goes off. Please let me know if you've seen them!

Python and Friends

Last year I decided to begin getting up to speed on all the amazing things going on in the Python community, particularly in machine learning and scientific computing. I'd written some Python over the years, used it on a hackathon here, a toy project there, reading others' code everywhere, but never really took the time to learn the language. As has been covered at length in many places coming from a long time in Ruby wasn't much of a jump. (Don't worry Ruby, you're still my go-to!) Last year, I made it through a great 3-part course, Foundations of Data Science, that provided a great foundation.
It's fun to feel like a n00b again.

AI policy and governance is something that also really burst through into popular discussion last year, and is something I've long enjoyed thinking about. From the common themes and lessons learned in (the attempted) regulation of any technology, to more recent literature like this and this on (the potential for) algorithmic inequality and abuse, to the discussions finally starting to percolate amongst legislatures everywhere, get your tech policy geek popcorn ready! There's a wealth of materials and food for thought in this free MIT course too. It's been on my "started strong then got distracted with another topic, and would love to get back to it" MOOC list.

And with that, see ya later 2018 In Tech, looking forward to what's next.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Popular posts from this blog

One article that really caught my attention recently discussed the use of Creative Commons-licensed images from Flickr as part of the MegaFace dataset for training facial recognition algorithms. Despite its aggressive (but not untrue) title, it highlights the many sides of the questions we the people and we the companies building products with these technologies face confront.

Focusing on the licensing, Flickr truly expanded the available commons of openly-licensed images by allowing its community to choose Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Interestingly, the latest version of the most permissive CC license expressly does not license "publicity, privacy, and/or other similar personality rights", yet the licensor agrees not to assert such rights to the extent necessary to support the rest of the license. However, previous versions of this or other CC licenses probably apply to many photos in the data set, and not all of the other licenses contain this language. For the Creative…

I recently attended a discussion of The Smart Enough City, which got me thinking about what "private enough" online services might mean to people. Privacy is an admittedly slippery concept and your idea of privacy may differ dramatically from mine. Privacy as "contextual integrity" is one concept that helps address the definitional inconsistencies by focusing on information transfer. However, the scholarly literature which I have great respect for won't be particularly useful in explaining what I'm working on to my relatives at Thanksgiving dinner. A look at some everyday online activities will demonstrate how the battle to make the Internet private enough is coming from many directions.
The first elephant in the room is online advertising, which is something I'm not entirely opposed to. It's just the undisclosed third party data sharing without anything that feels like meaningful opt out that’s too invasive. My views lean towards those articulated…

While updating a pdf recently, I noticed some metadata I wanted to change and a few annotations that were hidden from view but still in the file. However, the "Get Info" pane in Preview on OS X doesn't provide a metadata editor, nor does its Export function, so it seemed like a good opportunity to learn a bit more about the PDF standard and Python packages for getting the job done. Adobe Acrobat or other GUI's would've been much faster, but I'll likely need to do this programmatically again at some point like those of you who might've found this post by looking on your favorite privacy-preserving search engine for "change pdf metadata in python". So here we go.

Before starting, I hopped into a new folder and created a git repository with a first commit of my original pdf in case anything went wrong. Then I ran conda create --name pdf --python=3.8.1 and conda activate pdf to set up an Anaconda virtual Environment named pdf to keep my work isolate…

I'm a software developer and lawyer, writing about my adventures exploring new technologies, legal developments and sometimes their intersection. Occasionally some other random stuff sneaks in. Law-related posts are not legal advice, I am not your lawyer. All opinions are strictly my own.

Great overview of the history and current thinking in various areas of machine learning and AI more generally. The author gets into just enough details for technical readers while keeping plenty of examples and high level considerations ...